Authors: Kevin Holohan
“Finbar! Give me a hand with these few things,” his mother called from the front door. He took the box of photographs and ornaments from her and put it in the car. Declan stormed out of the house full of gangly seventeen-year-old bad temper and flopped into the backseat of the car. He sat there with a face like a curse on him and glared out the window at nothing in particular.
Mr. Sullivan oversupervised the movers loading the dining table and then ran back into the house. Finbar went in after him. The house echoed weirdly under his footsteps. Even the lino was gone. It had so quickly turned from his home into a shell of brick and floorboards. He watched his father stand at the top of the stairs and stare ruefully out the small window at his garden below. He went out to the car and sat in the backseat beside the silent, fuming Declan. Separated only by three years, they might as well have been from different planets. Finbar couldn’t be bothered even trying to talk to him and picked his own patch of nothing in particular to stare at and sighed.
“Will ye stop that sighing like an old woman, ye little prick! Just cos you’re going to miss the first day of school. Stupid sap,” hissed Declan.
“Ah, get lost you,” answered Finbar.
Declan rolled down the window and spat onto the street.
“Right so!” called Mrs. Sullivan as she came out of the house and pulled the door behind her. Its familiar clunk followed by the little rattle of the knocker and the letter box jabbed at Finbar with little pins of “not going to hear that sound again, boi!” He clenched his teeth and stared away down the street.
Mr. Sullivan slid into the car and foostered around under the seat trying to move it back from the steering wheel. His brother Francie, whose car it was, was a much thinner man than he. “Stupid fecking thing!” he muttered, and then gave up. Mrs. Sullivan got into the car and settled herself with a tug at her skirt and another quick, hollowly cheery “Right so!”
As they headed across Cork to the Dublin Road, Finbar peered out the window at all the familiar sights.
Off to Dublin!
he thought with scorn. A scorn that, ironically, his parents had spent most of his early years inculcating in him. Why the hell were they now taking him from the Real True Capital of the Country all the way to Dirty Dublin where they knew no one? He didn’t want to leave Cork. It was stupid, that’s what it was. It was just fecking stupid and thick. “That’s the why and there’ll be no more talk about it!” was not a reason.
J
esus wept! Get away from the window, will you?” shouted Mr. Laverty, the French teacher, as he banged on the frosted staff room window where the two gray shadows were sitting. Reluctantly the two shapes moved away. “Desperate, isn’t it?” he lamented to the crowded but mostly silent staff room. He went to his bag, took out his thermos, and poured himself a quick cup of coffee, then lit a cigarette and stared dejectedly through the dirty glass at the sliver of cloudy sky visible above the monastery. He wrinkled his nose, and his droopy mustache and small rheumy eyes momentarily moved closer together. September already. Where did the summer go? It seemed only a few days ago that they had finished up, looking forward to the long, easy summer.
Now, gazing out through the grubby window, hemmed in by the growing noise of the boys outside and surrounded by the heavy tired sounds of all the other teachers in the staff room, it all seemed so desperately far away and long ago, like something that had happened in someone else’s life.
“Another year in this kip,” he moaned.
“Ah, feck off with ye now, Laverty. The last thing we need is your complaining to add to it,” chided Spud Murphy, the History teacher. Spud flashed a big, crooked, nicotine-stained grin and puffed on the pipe that he hoped would finally help him give up cigarettes this year. His mischievous eyes wrinkled mockingly at Laverty through the cloud of smoke.
“Piss off, Murphy,” snapped Laverty, and winced at the smell of the pipe.
Slowly all in the staff room became aware that it was getting loud, very loud, outside in the yard. The white noise of the boys’ voices seemed to be pressing against the windows like some incredibly heavy fog. It was a weighty, mirthless sound filled with the hollow laughing and horseplay of boys trying to distract themselves from the long-dreaded day that had hung over the latter part of the summer like a toxic mist. It had finally come: the first day back at school.
“What time is it at all? My watch has stopped,” called Laverty.
“Ten to nine,” announced a bronchitic voice from the silence.
“Jaysus, but they’re eager, the little bastards,” replied Laverty, taking a deep, despairing drag of his cigarette.
“Eager, my arse,” huffed Mr. Devlin, the Biology teacher, from the doorway. “They’re just early cos they don’t remember how to be late from last year.” Mr. Devlin popped two more mints into his mouth and breathed on his hand to see if the dead beer smell was still there. He had only intended to have a couple of pints and get to bed early but then the night had spun a little out of control.
“Good morning, gentlemen! Nice of you to turn up on time for once, Mr. Devlin. We hope this is a new leaf,” clipped Mr. Pollock’s angular vice principal’s voice. He was right on Devlin’s heels. “Here are the class lists. To the hall with you now!” He dropped the sheaf of typed pages on the table, whisked around on the ball of his right foot with a mousey squeak of his brothel-creepers, and was gone.
“Poxy creep!” muttered Spud Murphy under his breath.
Mr. Barry, the Chemistry teacher, picked up the lists and started dealing them round the staff room like a stacked tarot deck that contained nothing but death cards.
In the monastery common room, Brother Kennedy pursed his thin cracked lips and ran his hand over his balding skull, smoothing the wisps of white hair over the bright red parchment of his scalp. He looked up briefly as the door creaked open and Brother Boland jittered his frail frame into the room. Boland’s watery blue eyes cowered in their sunken sockets and darted about the room as if expecting some sudden attack. The man had jittered for as long as Brother Kennedy could remember. Brother Kennedy was in his seventies and Boland seemed to him to be at least a generation older. School lore had it that when Brother Boland was in his thirties, one of the sixth years had dropped a desk on him from a third-floor window while allegedly trying to knock dirt out of the inkwell. The boy had been dispatched to Saint Loman’s Reformatory and later escaped to London. Brother Boland was never quite the same after it.
Brother Kennedy rarely exchanged words with Boland. It was too slow and arduous an undertaking, particularly first thing in the morning when the man’s speech was still staggered and hesitant.
“Ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-good morni-ni-ni-ni-ni-ni …”
“Good morning, Brother Boland.” Brother Kennedy snapped his newspaper and went back to the Gaelic football results. His county, Mayo, were not doing too well but he still held out hope that they would make the Connaught finals. More hope than he could ever hold out for the pathetic school team. The scholarship boys, mostly from the local flats and tenements, had the audacity to show their ingratitude to the Brothers by being good at soccer only. It was typical of bloody Dubliners. The more malleable boys who came from the suburbs because their parents were under some illusion about the reputation of the school were just not rough enough for Gaelic football, try though they might.
New Roof for Mullingar Dog Track in Jeopardy, Bishop May Intervene,
Brother Kennedy read with interest.
Brother Boland checked his watch against the wall clock and left the common room with a reptilian urgency.
Francis Scully turned into Greater Little Werburgh Street, North. There, on the corner with the West Circular Road, stood The Brothers of Godly Coercion School for Young Boys of Meager Means, or “De Brudders,” as it was more commonly known.
The sun was shining somewhere, but not anywhere near where Scully was. A dark shroud of despair surrounded him. The long summer of drizzly days with scattered outbreaks of sunshine lay lost behind him; it was now time to go back to school.
He looked up from the ground and the appalling sight of the dead end of Greater Little Werburgh Street, North, and the heavy school gates greeted him like a bout of stomach cramps.
Forty shades of gray was the only way to describe the schoolyard. The school buildings and the monastery that surrounded it on three sides were gray. Even the windows seemed to be gray. The concrete surface of the yard was gray. The sky above it was gray. The boys’ shirts, sweaters, and trousers were gray. The only thing that broke the uniformity was the occasional black school blazer. The yard was a variegated fugue on the theme of gray. Had it been music, it would have been slow, mournful stuff played on a bassoon, a tuba, and the pedals of a church organ.
Scully turned heavily into the yard and looked around. It was exactly the same as last year, but even familiarity with the scene could not lessen its soul-sapping effect. The dull murmur of subdued teenage voices only added to the overall gloom.
“Scully, ye bollix! Are they lettin’ ye back in?”
Scully looked over to see Lynch and McDonagh sitting beside the bin in the small covered shed. He walked over and stood in front of them.
“So?” asked McDonagh.
“So, nothing,” muttered Scully.
“Yeah, right,” agreed McDonagh.
“Shite,” added Lynch meaningfully. He extended his cupped hand and Scully took the lit cigarette it contained. He took a long drag and exhaled slowly so as not to cause a cloud.
“Now, you boys!” It was Brother Loughlin, the Head Brother. He was on the steps of the monastery. “You will all go to the hall and get your class assignments there. First years will report to Mr. Laverty, second years to Mr. Devlin, third years to Mr. Skelly, fifth years to Mr. Murphy, and sixth years to Mr. Barry.” Such menial tasks as calling out names were beneath the Brothers and left to the junior lay teachers.
No one moved.
“To the hall!” shouted Brother Loughlin. He started down the steps in a wave of cruel blubber, smoothed his eyebrows—apart from his nasal hair the only visible hair on his whole person—and took his leather strap out of the special pocket of his cassock.
Slowly the gray, reluctant sludge of boys began to ooze out of the yard and across the big yard to the hall. Scully, Lynch, and McDonagh fell in with the flow when they saw Brother Loughlin swing his leather and start in on some third years who were leaning against the wall in a manner unbecoming of boys who should be on their way to the hall.
“Jaysus! Bollocks Pollock for form master. What is that for?”
“He’s a complete bastard.”
“It’s cos of the fire in the basement.”
“Can’t prove anything.”
“No. But …”
Scully, Lynch, and McDonagh thus examined their fate as they walked back from the hall. It had been good fun for a bit, pretending not to be able to hear their names called out, answering for other people, calling out that others weren’t coming back this year because they had been taken away by zombie spaceships, but there was no escaping it: they were going to have Pollock as their form master for the rest of the year, which at that moment felt pretty much like the rest of their lives.
“Yeah, and what is Smalley Mullen doing in our class?”
“Don’t know. Maybe we’re the new A class.”
The three of them burst out laughing.
“In ainm an Athair agus an Mhic agus an Spiorad Naomh, Amen.” Mr. Ignatius Pollock, the first lay vice principal in the history of the school, finished blessing himself in the tongue of the Gaels, and the prayer, probably a Hail Mary from what the boys could gather, was done. Mr. Pollock reflexively and pointlessly smoothed his wispy ginger hair over his bald spot, pursed his thin lips, and proceeded to call the roll.
“… McDonagh?”
“Here. I mean, anseo.”
“Mullen?”
“Here, ehm, present, ehm, anseo.”
“O’Connor?”
“Anseo.”
“Rutledge?”
“Here, eh, anseo.”
“Scully?”
“Anseo.”
“Sullivan?”
Who was Sullivan? The only Sullivan anyone knew was Kieran Sullivan and he was in sixth year. There had been no Sullivan in third year with them last year. Mr. Pollock looked up from the roll book.
“Finbar Sullivan? Fionnbarr Ó Súilleabháin?”
Still no answer.
“We go to the trouble of making last-minute arrangements to fit him in and he does not even deign to turn up on the first day,” Pollock complained to no one in particular. From the top pocket of his time-shined suit jacket, he removed a red pen and tut-tutted to himself in disapproval as he marked Finbar Sullivan absent.
He carefully examined the boys before him. Suddenly he spun around and furiously wrote the days of the week across the blackboard:
Dé Lúain, Dé Máirt, Dé Céadaoin, Déardaoin, Dé hAoine
. Down the side he wrote the times in fifty-minute intervals from nine through half past three.
He turned around and looked inquiringly at the boys, his eyebrows raised.
McDonagh raised his hand. “Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir!” he implored breathlessly, as if there were stiff competition to volunteer an answer.
“An tUasal, Mhic Donnacha!” announced Mr. Pollock, and gestured to the boy.
“Irish words, sir,” answered McDonagh with a false enthusiasm you could have bottled. That was McDonagh’s thing. It was a subtle and relatively safe form of disruptiveness, that and being able to faint at will. He was a reasonably good farter too but not one of the best, not up there with Lynch who could play simple tunes out of his arse.
“Ní thuigim,” announced Mr. Pollock.
McDonagh looked crestfallen. He stood up slowly, walked sadly to the door, opened it, went outside, and softly closed it behind him. Mr. Pollock stood rooted to the spot. He was momentarily at a loss. He roused himself, went to the door, and opened it. McDonagh turned and looked at him, his face a caricature of contrition. Mr. Pollock motioned him back inside the class and stared at McDonagh questioningly.